James S. Siegal

Born in Newport on October 27, 1925, he was the son of the late Sonner and Ethel (Josephson) Siegal. He grew up in the former Josephson family homestead on Pleasant Street.

He attended local grammar schools and graduated from Rogers High School, Class of 1943. He was one of the two boys invited to matriculate at Brown University in the middle of their senior year at Rogers. He received the Sc.B. in Electrical Engineering at Brown two years later.

Entering the U.S. Army Air Corps, he got his “Jeep” training at Keesler Field, Mississippi, and was then stationed at Mitchell Field, Long Island. While in the Army, he was assigned to IBM’s computer program (ENIAC) at world headquarters in New York City and at their production facilities in Endicott, New York.

On discharge from the military service in 1946, he was invited to join the Brown faculty in Providence as an Engineering Instructor.

He went on to complete his graduate education at Columbia University’s School of Engineering, where he earned the M.S. degree in Industrial Engineering, and later received the MBA degree at the Harvard Business School.

He got his first taste of business management in New Jersey at world headquarters of Schering Corporation, where he was the first to apply statistical quality control techniques (S.Q.C.) to the production of ampoule sterility. He next joined the corporate headquarters of Smith, Kline & French Laboratories in Philadelphia, another large pharmaceutical manufacturer.

Next, he was recruited to the Management Consulting Division of Ernst & Ernst in Los Angeles, California as the Consultant for Executive Staffing of the firm’s largest industrial client corporations throughout the United States.

In 1970 he was hired to head Executive Staffing by the Board Chairman of FHP, Inc., a fledgling California based HMO when it was a small-sized ($10 million revenue) private corporation. The company grew to a medical giant ($13 billion revenue) with medical clinics and hospitals throughout the western states and Guam in the far Pacific. He was promoted to Corporate Vice President of Executive Staffing when the company was listed on the NYSE in the early 1980’s.

After 40 years of corporate life in California, he retired to Jacksonville, Florida where he indulged in his hobby of breeding and showing purebred dogs. He was a long-time member of kennel clubs in New Jersey and California.

He was a member of AIEE, AIIE, and Alumni Associations of Brown, Columbia, and Harvard. As a youth in Newport, he was a Boy Scout (Troup 7) and was a member if the A.Z.A. Later in life he was a member of the Society of Friends of Touro Synagogue and the Newport Historical Society. He was a long-time subscriber of the Newport Mercury.